Amber Butchart: The Forensic Fashion of Agatha Christie

The Agatha Christie Festival is delighted to welcome Amber Butchart for the first time. Amber is often seen on television in shows such as Great British Sewing Bee sharing her extensive knowledge on the history of fashion. For many Christie fans, it is the costumes and fashions in the TV and film adaptations that epitomise the glamour of the Golden Age of crime fiction. However, there is a deeper connection between these fashions and Christie’s texts.

Drawing on the evidence found in Christie’s detective novels, fashion historian and Forensic Garment Analyst Amber Butchart investigates the relationship between clothing and crime in her work.

Amber Butchart is a curator, historian and broadcaster who specialises in the cultural and political history of textiles, dress and design. She has researched and presented documentaries for television and radio, including the six-part series A Stitch in Time for BBC Four that fused biography, art and the history of fashion to explore the lives of historical figures through the clothes they wore, and she is the history consultant and resident historian for BBC One's Great British Sewing Bee. She is a practitioner in the field of fashion forensics, acting as an external adviser for the National Crime Agency as a Forensic Garment Analyst, working on cases that require investigation of clothing and textiles. She's the author of five books on the history and culture of dress, and her exhibitions include The Fabric of Democracy at the Fashion and Textile Museum and Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style at the Design Museum, both in London.

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